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The Feynman Lectures On Physics Vol. II Ch. 1 - Ele-WT - Summaries

The document discusses the principles of electromagnetism, focusing on electrical and nuclear forces, the characteristics of electric and magnetic fields, and the laws governing their interactions. It highlights the significance of Maxwell's discoveries in understanding electromagnetism, which has profound implications in science and technology. The text also emphasizes the relationship between electric currents, magnetic fields, and the effects of motion on these forces.

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Satyarth Pansuriya
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32 views4 pages

The Feynman Lectures On Physics Vol. II Ch. 1 - Ele-WT - Summaries

The document discusses the principles of electromagnetism, focusing on electrical and nuclear forces, the characteristics of electric and magnetic fields, and the laws governing their interactions. It highlights the significance of Maxwell's discoveries in understanding electromagnetism, which has profound implications in science and technology. The text also emphasizes the relationship between electric currents, magnetic fields, and the effects of motion on these forces.

Uploaded by

Satyarth Pansuriya
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. II Ch.

1:
Electromagnetism

1–1Electrical forces
If there were two kinds of matter, positive and negative, and they were evenly mixed,
the forces would balance themselves out almost perfectly, forming tight, fine
mixtures of the positive and the negative, and there would be practically no attraction
or repulsion at all.
All matter is a mixture of positive protons and negative electrons which are attracting
and repelling with this great force. When you stand near someone else you don't feel
any force at all.
The electrical forces that hold atoms and molecules together are really forces
between individual charges that vary inversely as the square of the distance. If the
balance of charge is not perfect, or if the distances are very small, a net force can
arise.
The quantum effects keep the protons and electrons from getting any closer
together, even if the electrical attraction is so terrific that they want to be on top of
each other.
In addition to electrical forces, nuclei also have nonelectrical forces, called nuclear
forces, which hold the protons together in spite of the electrical repulsion. The
nuclear forces, however, have a short range. Nuclear forces act between protons
and their nearest neighbors, while electrical forces act over larger distances, giving a
repulsion between protons and all of the others in the nucleus. If a nucleus is tapped
lightly, it breaks into two pieces, each with a positive charge.
We may ask, finally, what holds a negatively charged electron together. Perhaps the
electron is just a point and electrical forces only act between different point charges,
so that the electron does not act upon itself.
The electrical force decreases inversely as the square of the distance between
charges, but it depends also on the motions of the charges in a complicated way.
A charge moving with a velocity v exerts a force on other charges in the universe,
but the force on the new charge will be proportional to the amount of charge so long
as the other charges do not change their positions or motions.
The motion of a particle can be found by combining the equation of motion with the
force on it. The principle of superposition of fields applies to electric and magnetic
fields.
The law for the electric and magnetic fields produced by a single charge moving in
an arbitrary way is the simplest way to describe the laws of electrodynamics.
The laws of electrodynamics are not simplest when applied to charges moving
about, but when applied to charges standing still, the Coulomb force law is simple.
1–2Electric and magnetic fields
The electric and magnetic vectors E and B are defined in terms of the forces that are
felt by a charge. We can think of the vectors E and B as giving the forces that would
be experienced by a charge located at a certain point.
A field is a physical quantity which takes on different values at different points in
space. There have been various inventions to help the mind visualize the behavior of
fields. The most correct is also the most abstract: we simply consider the fields as
mathematical functions of position and time. A field can be either a scalar field
(temperature) or a vector field (electricity and magnetic fields), which are
represented by the x, y, z, and t vectors.
Although electromagnetic fields are produced by charges according to complicated
formulas, they have a very simple relationship between values at one point and
values at a nearby point.
There have been various inventions to help the mind visualize the behavior of fields.
The most correct is to consider the fields as mathematical functions of position and
time, and to draw field lines at many points in space that follow the arrows and keep
track of the direction of the field.
1–3Characteristics of vector fields
A vector field has two mathematically important properties: it has a quality of
"outflow" and it has a component of velocity perpendicular to the surface. The flow
through an element of a surface is just equal to the component of velocity
perpendicular to the surface times the area.
The flux of a vector field through a surface is defined as the average value of the
normal component of the vector times the area of the surface. The flux of an electric
field through a surface is defined in the same way.
A vector field that describes the flow of a liquid can be defined as the average
tangential component of the vector multiplied by the circumference of a loop that
closes back on itself. This gives a number that is proportional to the circulation
velocity of the liquid.

Flux=(average normal component)⋅(surface area).

Circulation=(average tangential component)⋅(distance around).


With just two ideas - flux and circulation - we can describe all the laws of electricity
and magnetism at once.
1–4The laws of electromagnetism
The first law of electromagnetism describes the flux of the electric field through any
closed surface as the net charge inside 0, where 0 is a convenient constant. If there
are no charges inside the surface, the average normal component of E is zero, so
there is no net flux through the surface.
If we measure the circulation of the electric field around an arbitrary stationary curve
in space, we will find that it is not zero.
The laws of electrodynamics are not nearly as simple to write down as the laws of
Newton, which means that it will take us quite a lot of time to figure them all out.
A wire hangs above a bar magnet, and moves when a current is passed through it.
This happens because the charges inside the wire are moving, and the magnetic
field from the magnet exerts a force on them, which pushes the wire sideways.
When the wire is pushed to the left, the magnet should feel a push to the right. A
more sensitively supported magnet will show the movement.
The current in the wire produces a magnetic field that exerts forces on the magnet.
This field is made up of loops around the wire.
Equation (1.9) tells us that the magnetic field of a wire exerts a force on a magnet.
The force decreases linearly with the distance from a long straight wire.
A current through a wire produces a magnetic field, and a magnetic field exerts a
force on a wire carrying a current. Two hanging wires attract, but when their currents
are opposite, they repel.
Electrical currents, as well as magnets, make magnetic fields. A piece of iron acts as
though it contains a perpetual circulating current, and we can understand magnets in
terms of permanent currents in the atoms of the iron.
The currents in iron come from the spin of the electrons, not from the motion of the
electrons in atomic orbits. The reason why the magnetism cancels out in most
substances is because the electrons spin with their axes lined up.
Since magnets are fields of currents, we do not have to add any extra term to Eqs.
(1.8) or (1.9) to take care of magnets.
Maxwell discovered that changing electric fields produce magnetic effects. Without
this term, there would be no currents in circuits that are not complete loops. A
capacitor made of two flat plates is charged by a current that flows toward one plate
and away from the other. If we fill in a curve with a surface that crosses one of the
wires, the circulation of B around C is given by the current in the wire.
With the setup shown in Fig. 1 - 6, we can demonstrate another law of
electromagnetism: the force F=qvB on the electrons in the wire causes the electrons
to move toward the galvanometer.
A moving magnet makes an electric field, which in turn produces forces on charges
at rest. This equation describes many phenomena of great practical interest.
1–5What are the fields?
We now make a few remarks on our way of looking at this subject. We are going to
explain so-called direct-contact action in terms of the picture for electrical forces, and
the muscular pushes and pulls are going to be interpreted as electrical forces. Some
people prefer to represent electrical effects as the interaction at a distance of
charges, while others love the field lines. The field lines are only a crude way of
describing a field, and they do not contain the deepest principle of electrodynamics,
which is the superposition principle.
In the case of the magnetic field, if you try to explain what happens to two charges
moving in space, both at the same speed and parallel to each other, you will see that
the magnetic field disappears when you ride along with the charges.
The magnetic force between two wires in our experiment is really a relativistic effect,
because the "normal" electrical forces between the moving electrons have
disappeared because of the almost perfect balancing out, and the small relativistic
term which we call the magnetic force becomes the dominant term.
When relativity was discovered, the electromagnetic laws didn't need to be changed,
because they were already correct to a precision of v2/c2.
1–6Electromagnetism in science and technology
The Greeks studied many phenomena, but two very strange ones were amber and
lodestone, which attracted iron. Later scientists discovered that chemical interaction
and, ultimately, life itself, are to be understood in terms of electromagnetism.
When electromagnetism was understood, technical possibilities that defied the
imagination of the people that came before were appearing. Today we are applying
even more subtle effects, and we can tell what a man is doing by the way he affects
the electrons in a thin metal rod.
Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics will be judged as the most
significant event of the 19th century.

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